WILL THE WORLD FLOCK TO WICHITA FALLS?

Published: August 7, 1988

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SEVERAL PEOPLE TOLD me, in one way or another, ''Wichita Falls greatest resource is people,'' and I think this is true. They are helpful, honest and polite. Every conversation seems to end with the phrase ''Appreciate it.'' Often I was not even aware I had done someone a favor until I heard it.

They live for the moment and don't worry too much. This may have something to do with the climate. Memory seems to evaporate in the intense heat. Many people I talked to had trouble remembering if something happened five months ago, or five years ago.

They are reluctant to say anything bad about others. This year, a local savings and loan folded without warning. There were persistent rumors that the president had put his own money in another bank the day before. Still, everyone I talked to told me he was a good man, a nice man, and he would get their money back for them someday, somehow.

They have a lot to be proud of. In many ways, Wichita Falls has improved. The schools are better, the police force is better, there are more hospitals and parks. There are events like the FallsFest and the ''Hotter 'n Hell Hundred'' bicycle race, which people attend from all over the country.

There is a whole new part of town, out on Kemp Boulevard, where there is a shopping mall, restaurants and mammoth grocery stores like the Food Emporium, where you can buy everything, including hog heads, beef feet and buffalo burgers.

But there is still a deep uncertainty here. As I drove out Kemp toward the mall one morning, I couldn't help noticing the billboards. Some had personal messages (''Udder Excitement! The Old Heifer is forty today!'') But a great number carried religious admonitions, including one, larger than all the rest, that asked, ''What Will You Say When God Asks You What You Have Done With the Child That He Gave You?''

The plains are a region of elemental forces, and people have always sought consolation in elemental religions. (In 1979, one of the largest tornadoes ever recorded tore through this very part of town.) Then there are the modern problems: banks collapsing, child abuse, illegal aliens and drugs. (North Texas is reputed to be ''the amphetamine capital of the world.'') Evangelical Christianity, with its old fundamentalist notion that these might be the Last Days, and its new notions of worldly success, is the perfect religion for Wichita Falls. The world might be ending, but things could still turn out all right if one works hard enough and has enough faith.

After parking my car, I walked into the shopping mall. The Muzak was playing ''Running Bear,'' a song popular when I was in high school. The corridors were clean and well-lighted. The 1979 tornado had torn the roof off of this mall, but you would never know it. Business was good. As I left, a Jehovah's Witness gave me a pamphlet that said nuclear war would be the Armageddon predicted in the Holy Bible, but that afterward, for the faithful, there would be a paradise on earth. I had seen it before. The illustration showed a family living in the woods, the children playing with bears and mountain lions while their parents watched, sitting in aluminum patio chairs that looked like they came from Wal-Mart.

IN THE 1920'S, WHEN civic pride was at its previous height, Hubert Harrison, head of the Chamber of Commerce, wrote a poem called ''The City that Faith Built,'' which was set to music by R. E. Shepherd (''The Singing Mayor''): We live in the City that Faith Built Out where the West begins, Where friendships are true And success beckons you In a thousand different ways. Opportunity new With each dawn comes to you Where the derrick touches the sky. Let me live in that land In that Red River land Where the best in me hears a clear call. I will work, work, work For my hometown, The City of Wichita Falls.

Wichita Falls has always been a working man's town, and in my day that meant working for the oil industry. Oil supported the city's economy all through the 1940's, 50's and 60's. Everyone, it seemed, was a roughneck, or employed by a drilling company or one of the local refineries.

All this had to end, and some people knew it. In the 60's, a group of local businessmen began a concentrated effort to attract new industries. They brought in, among others, PPG Corporation, Certainteed, Stanley Tools, Johnson & Johnson and Cryovac - industries that made ''durable products'' hardly affected by economic swings. In January 1986, when the price of oil bottomed out, the industries absorbed the jobless, and today almost everybody is back to work.

So Wichita Falls is still a working man's town, where men do what they always did: labor all day, and drink all night at bars like Little Brothers or the Rodeo Clown Saloon. The favorite drink is still the Red Draw, beer mixed with tomato juice -drunk, I've always thought, in unconscious celebration of the local water.

However, things may be taking another direction. Some people, like former Mayor Charles Harper, think the future of Wichita Falls lies in tourism.